Understanding mix buses

When you have two or more mixer channels routed into a single mixer channel, we call the combined audio a bus, also known as a mix bus. Buses are useful for combining sounds together and making them appear related to one another.

The master channel is a type of bus that collects audio from all the other mixer channels. Most of the time, when we talk about a bus, we aren’t referring to the master channel, though.

You can generally think of a bus as a checkpoint along the way to the master channel. Does the audio coming out of the bus sound good so far up to this point? In most songs, you will have a bus for your drums, a bus combining the layering of your instruments, and a bus for your vocals.

Let’s set up a mix bus in our mixer:

1. Load up two instruments in the channel rack, add some notes, and copy those notes to both instruments.
2. Route both instruments to separate new mixer channels.
3. In the mixer, select both...